WINDHOEK (Reuters) – Dirk Mudge, a white Namibian who spent his political life with the pro-apartheid National Party and later pushed for the independence of Namibia from the white South African minority, died after contracting COVID-19, at the age of 92 years.
He died Tuesday in one in the capital Windhoek.
A polarizing figure, Mudge’s wary parties accused him of delaying Namibia’s independence from neighboring South Africa by organizing a national convention from 1975 to 1977.
His goal was to make small reforms that would appease the indigenous population of Namibia and save them from a full-scale war of independence with the rebels.
Namibia, a former German colony, had been ruled through South Africa since World War I, when it was under British imperial rule. It did not gain independence until 1990, some six decades after Britain gave up South Africa, whose network of Afrikaner settlers continued. to create apartheid.
Mudge joined the Namibian branch of the White Nationalist Party in 1955, but later learned that the interests of its white leaders resided in negotiating with the black majority to open up to democracy, just as Klerk’s FW later did in South Africa.
“Although we constitute other political circles and Array of ideals . . . Dirk MudgeArray . . . a leader willing to compromise for the sake of peace and a new Namibia,” Namibian President Hage Geingob said in a statement.
Movege to a member of the Constituent Assembly, who drafted Namibia’s charter after the 1989 elections that led to the country’s independence a year later.
Editing via Tim Cocks and Angus MacSwan
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